My two cents worth
*On Arthapedia
*
- Attempting to use wikis is a commendable effort on the part of
government officers. Lack of competence shouldn't be confused for poor
intentions.
- The site does mention any license (copyleft/right) at all. They have
clear contact details of some officers so I am bringing it to their
attention. Lets see if they respond.
- I will suggest to them that the Wikimedia community may be able to
offer a training session in Delhi. Possibility of experts (ala GLAM) editing
Wikipedia is a good thing.
*On Wikipedia vs Wiki*
- Increasingly, and especially in India, all wiki sites will be termed as
'Wikipedia-like' sites by the media even though they may differ entirely in
their modus operandi (licensing, content, etc). The community needs to take
a call whether they want to keep emphasizing on how Wikipedia is different
or let the lines blur. So for insance, should Kaushik Basu (very notable
economist and the brain behind the site) of Arthapedia be invited as a
speaker for WikiConference India (possibly yes if community is ok with the
lines blurring, possibly no if they want to keep it distinct). My concern
with the name WikiConference India was on similar lines during the voting
for the name.
- Irrespective of the above, the community also should have a point of
view on whether they should have academies and such for other wiki sites run
by particular groups (IES economists for instance). Pro - Increases the base
of wiki editors (and in this case experts). The wiki site in question could
extensively end up using Wikimedia Commons. Con - Spreading already very
thin resources of the community.
Best regards,
Sohel.
------------------------------
Message: 5
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2011 11:43:25 +0530
From: Srikanth Lakshmanan <srik.lak(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Arthapedia - Indian Gov Site on the
lines of Wikipedia
To: Wikimedia India Community list
<wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
<
CA+30aUN0pcc7or7rUXXjfpCE1W9+jzgMjCv8PTkckW3+z1cKZw(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 22:20, Gautam John <gautam(a)prathambooks.org>
wrote:
> Not really a Wikipedia model, what?
>
> Crying shame about the license.
>
Only valid concern is about license, but then if its about bridging the
gap
between policymakers and general public, I feel it will be yet another
"tam-tam" site from govt and will have no encyclopedia content. We could
still use the content as RS since it comes from govt.
> Wondering if the Chapter and the Office can do anything?
>
FYI: Arthapedia is available at arthapedia.in
I dont think there is a room for involvement since the goals are not
even
intersecting except that they use Mediawiki. Looking at the site, an
academy
about how to put Wiki texts(syntax), making successful Interlinked
content
can be given a shot, but then it will help only their project and public
over all and may be a fraction of them editing Wikipedia. Currently they
are
just copy pasting documents without interlinking. Some Mediawiki
help(tips/advice) too can be given.
--
Regards
Srikanth.L
Dear all,
The first WikiAcademy in Mumbai is happening at the Center for Education and
Documentation (CED), Colaba on October 1, 2011. The Academy will be held
between 11 am to 6 pm.The Mumbai community hopes that this will be the first
among several such academies to be organised in Mumbai.
To sign up, please go to this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academy/Mumbai1
The talk page will be used for planning the event but can also be used to
raise any questions that you may have.
warm regards,
Pradeep Mohandas
--
Pradeep Mohandas
How Pradeep uses email - http://goo.gl/6v1I9
Dear Wikimedia India Members and Community,
The highlights of Chapter Update for September 2011 are given below.
Membership Update
The membership base, as on September 4th, 2011, stands at 81 members.
*Gender* Male membership is at 68 corresponding to 84% and Female membership
is at 13 corresponding to 16%.
*Geographic location* Maharashtra accounted for largest number of members at
30 followed by Karnataka at 26 and Kerala at 9.
*Vocation* Industry members are the highest at 28 followed by Student at 19
and Academia at 10. Others category has 24.
*Preferred language as Editor* English at 67 corresponding to 92% stands
first followed by Malayalam 13 and Hindi 7.
AGM and Executive Committee Elections
Notice for the first Annual General Body Meeting to be held on the 24th of
September, 2011 at the Centre for Internet and Society, 194, 2nd Cross,
Dommaluru 2nd stage, Bangalore-560071 has been sent by post and by email.
Simultaneous with the AGM, we are holding elections to fill three vacancies
in the Executive Committee. We have six members standing for these three
posts and all members who are members on or before the 23 June 2011 are
eligible to vote and have been posted an authenticated ballot paper that can
be used either by post or in person at the AGM.
More details here:
http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=a4a966d3118da2bc83baffaf5&id=38e6a54252
Chapter, India Office and Foundation Coordination
A monthly call between the India Chapter and the Wikimedia Foundation has
been instituted and members of the Chapter EC, Hisham Mundol and Asaf Bartov
will participate. The objective of the call is to share information and
improve collaboration between the Chapter and the Foundation on various
Wikimedia projects of relevance to India. The first call was held on Aug 24,
2011.
Outreach and Wiki Acadamies
We have been encouraged by the early response to Wiki Acadamies and there
are currently three planned at the Department of Public Libraries,
Bangalore, Thatzit Pvt Ltd, Mumbai and GCET, Greater Noida.
More information on these and on how to host your own Academy is available
here: http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Specific_segment_outreach
We look forward to your continued support and appreciate all assistance to
help expand our membership base and hope to see many of you at the AGM! Till
next month...
Best,
Gautam John
Hiya,
Further information about each of the following will be given at a later date, this is just to give advance notice to all concerned so that you can block your diaries.
17 September - Mumbai Monthly Meetup, Venue: CED Colaba
Sign up for this event: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Mumbai/Mumbai13
1 October, WikiAcademy, Venue: CED Colaba Topic covered: How to edit Wikipedia, at the grassroots
Sign up for this event: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academy/Mumbai1
8 October - OpenMaps Workshop - On ground, University of Mumbai - Fort Campus neighbourhood (venue of WikiConference India 2011)
Sign up for this event: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workshop/Mumbai_Workshop_2
We hope to see good levels of participation for all these events.
Kind Regards,
This is relevant to all those who have written to the various lists and
asked how one can participate. volunteer or help in any way.
We need people to upload images to Wikimedia Commons.
- We face a problem in that photographers are willing to go out & shoot
and donate images. But they are unfamiliar with Commons and do not upload it
there. However, we find that they know Flickr and are willing to upload it
under a suitable Creative Commons license.
- There are hundreds of free images on the net, we can show you how to
locate them. These can be uploaded to Commons. We are at this point of time
interested in images pertaining to India only.
It is a job requiring patience, care for details and intelligence as the
images need to be categorised also. Where relevant we would like to add them
to articles too.
We need a small TEAM of three to five - people, age, sex, religion, etc,
etc, no bar, except that they should have:
* Knowledge of uploading images to Commons
* know how to categorise
* know how to load images into Wikipedia
* Possess good judgement.
* Possess an abiding love for Wikipedia and willing to contribute to it.
If you are interested, let us know. This is a serious commitment under the
"India Loves Wikipedia" initiative. Dont apply if just for "time paas".
Helpers will be awarded barnstars at a suitable date after the project is
done.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
------------------------------------------------------
Thank you for your response. Putting together subject-based collections
aligned to specific state & central boards would be extremely helpful, so
any assistance you can provide would be very welcome. Even if there is no
money to print books, such collections still have value for schools in
electronic formats - the general Wikipedia for Schools collection (based
on a UK curriculum) is popular all over the world. But we should still
try to get some interest in books, too!
Thanks a lot,
Martin
Martin A. Walker
Department of Chemistry
SUNY College at Potsdam
Potsdam, NY 13676 USA
+1 (315) 267-2271
> Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2011 16:47:47 +0530 (IST)
> From: devwrat dube <devwrat(a)thetimesofeducation.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Subject-based books of Wikipedia
> content
> To: Wikimedia India Community list
> <wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <1314962267.52919.YahooMailClassic(a)web5606.biz.mail.in.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
>
> Hello sir,
> I am glad you took such a step. I am a student of the Indian Institute of
> Science Education and Research (IISER)- mohali. Presently I am in first
> year. I have been doing some work in the field of education for past 3
> years but I was really active only in the past year. I would like to help
> you in chalking out a syllabus suitable for many state boards and the
> central boards. This attempt might work very well in english itself though
> publication in hindi would not be a bad idea either. However I doubt if
> some agency would be supporting this initiative. I can try to talk to some
> officials nearby but the problem is that I do not have proper credentials
> to represent any body. However, I will try to do whatever I can. Let me
> know, if I can be of some use.
>
Heya all,
This is just a small message I'm passing on to you all.
I don't know if it has been mentioned here [in all probability, Vaibhav Jain
would have], as I don't subscribe to the mailing list anymore.
If you need to contact me, you have my email address from this mail, as said
I don't get mails from the WMI list.
Huggle, the vandal fighting tool, has been translated to Hindi.
I had started it back in 2009, and Rohit took over, did most of the
translations, and Vaibhav Jain finished it in the end.
It works in both ways:
Hindi interface on the English Wikipedia :
English interface on Hindi Wikipedia:
You can practically use the application in any of the available languages on
any of the enabled Wikis where you have rollback rights.
I have used the Hindi interface on the English Wikipedia.
I have heard that there are issues with the Hindi Wikipedia. I wanted to
apply for rollback rights on the Hindi Wikipedia to test it out, but I
didn't due to a few offline conflicts with Hindi sysops.
I got User VaibhavsKulkarni to start work on Marathi, but he left it due to
personal reasons, I am now looking for Marathi volunteers.
I created a page for Kannada, but no work has been done [or so, the last
time I checked].
This has happened inspite of me repeatedly requesting people on the mailing
list to help [which nobody apparently has enough time for].
Please take some interest.
Some piece of software is now available in an Indian language.
That enough is a reason for us to contribute.
Enjoy localisation here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Huggle/Localization
Cheers,
Rsrikanth05
--
Regards,
Srikanth Ramakrishnan,
Student, Bachelor of Computer Applications,
Bharathiar University, Coimbatore.
Dear Wikimedians
I would like share an unusual story (unusual - especially for Indic language
wiki communities) that Malayalam wiki community had faced few months back.
In the month of February 2011, I had received an SOS call from a school
teacher (Satyasheelan) who is teaching at the Government School for the
Blind in the Kasargod
distric<http://www.webelmediatronics.in/brlads/directory_Kerala.htm>t
of Kerala. Satyasheelan was seeking Malayalam wikipedian's support to fix
few issues that he and his students faced with few Malayalam alphabets when
they read Malayalam wikipedia using a speech synthesizing software called
eSpeak <http://espeak.sourceforge.net/>. His phone call was surprise to us
since Malayalam wikimedians were not aware that visually challenged people
are using Malayalam wikipedia. (We were aware about the existence of a
software by Santhosh (named Dhawni <http://dhvani.sourceforge.net/>) to read
unicode Malayalam (and other Indic languages also) which is in its early
stages of development). So Satyasheelan's call was surprising.
After his phone call few Malayalam wikipedians (Junaid, Thachan Makan, and
I) contacted Jonathan Duddington <http://sourceforge.net/users/jonsd>, the
primary developer (?) of eSpeak, and we worked with him to fix the issues
for Malayalam that Satyasheelan had pointed out. Jonathan fixed the issues
pretty fast and later Satyasheelan informed us that now they are able to use
Malayalam wikipedia without any issues.
Later while we were planning for the 4th Malayalam wiki
meetup<http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%B5%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%95%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%95%…>(2011
July 11) at Kannur, we decided to invite Satyasheelan to conduct a
session, since Malayalam wikimedians liked to hear the experience of
students of Blind school (using Malayalam wikipedia). But when Satyasheelan
came for the meetup we were surprised and taken aback when we learnt that
Satyasheelan is also a visually challenged person. Few of the his colleagues
(who are also visually challenged) also attended the meetup. Satyasheelan
was accompanied by his son, Nalin.
The meetup was attended by more than 80 Malayalam wikipedians. Few photos
are available here<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Malayalam_Wikimeetup_4_-_Kannur_…>.
We are happy that Bishaka, Hisham, and Tory were kind enough to join us for
this meetup. There were various programs conducted as part of this meetup
(the report of the meetup is available at various locations (in Malayalam)).
Definitely the highlight of the meetup was the demonstration by
Satyasheelaman. So this mail is about that.
Malayalam wikimedian Ajay Kuyiloor took extra efforts to record
Satyasheelan's session. We are sharing an edited version of this session
assuming that this information will help other Indic language wiki
communities.
The video of Satyasheelan's session is available here: *
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr1T3HeBTvU* The duration of the video is
around 9 minutes. We specially thank Ajay Kuyiloor, Girish Mohan, and Jithin
who worked on this video. We admit the low quality of video since we were
not prepared for such a session. Inconvenience due to this is deeply
regretted.
Malayalam community is welcoming your comments regarding this story so that
the discussion regarding this will benefit rest of the Indic wiki
communities also. We are actually humbled by the fact that work we do in
wikipedia is reaching out to people from all wakes of life.
*NOTE:* Satyasheelan specially thanked Malayalam wikimedians for creating a
special navigational
template<http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%AB%E0%B4%B2%E0%B4%95%E0%B4%82:%E0%B4%85…>for
reaching out easily to wikipedia articles. I still remember in 2008
when
Malayalam wikipedia user:Sadhik Khalid
<http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%89%E0%B4%AA%E0%B4%AF%E0%B5%8B%E0%B4%95%…>created
this template, some of us had doubted the need of such a template. Our doubt
was, why such a template is required when users can reach out to articles
easily using serach box. Now to our surprise we understood this template is
very much useful for the visually challenged people (whom we never thought
about before).
Video of Satyasheelan's session is available here:*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr1T3HeBTvU*
Thanks
Shiju Alex